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This was just one of the chosen exchanges to be captured in the indictment, revealing the extent to which the FBI had infiltrated Megaupload’s email system. The FBI liberally detailed the contents of emails, capturing the evolution of Megaupload from within. There was a 2006 email from van der Kolk to a friend which included a screenshot of a Megaupload listing for a cracked (encryption broken) copy of the CD and DVD burning program Alcohol 120. The FBI also picked out of the email servers an email from van der Kolk which included 100 Megaupload links to electronica trance DJ Armin van Buuren. Also in the listing of email exchanges was one from Dotcom in December 2006, in which he sent a Megaupload link of a 50 Cent track — a single which the FBI said was still active in December 2011.

It was an allegation later dropped in a superceding indictment, after Dotcom told an online news site the origins of the claim. It was a a track he owned, purchased in 2005 and labelled on the site as a “test upload”. It had only been downloaded once.

The Megaupload team’s email traffic also, according to the FBI, captured the evolution of the rewards program. The program saw payments made to those users whose files were the most popular on Megaupload. The indictment said the terms under which people signed up made a clear statement that “the uploading of copyrighted files would result in disqualification” — but said “the Mega Conspiracy rarely, if ever, terminated the accounts of individuals who posted copyrighted content”. Agents detailed the reward scheme, which ran from September 2005 until July 2011. It offered the possibility of earning up to US$10,000 for popular uploads, categorised and phrased in a variety of ways from the initial “ranking” system through to counting “reward points”.

In February 2007, van der Kolk sent Ortmann a list of user names and the payments proposed according to their user history. There were “popular DVD rips” and “software with key generators (warez)” — cracked software. It also linked the uploaders of popular files to Vietnamese content. One of those was owed US$1500, according to the 2007 payment round, but earned a total of $55,000 through Megaupload’s life, the FBI said.

The indictment included van der Kolk’s summary of users who qualified for reward payments: “Our old famous number one on MU, still some illegal files but I think he deserves a payment”; “Loads of PDF files (looks like scanned magazines)”; “looks like Vietnamese DVD rips”; “This user was paid last time has mainly split RAR (a compression file format) files, however more than 50% deleted through abuse reports.”

The emails were a peek inside the business, with van der Kolk reporting just months later that half the claims for reward payments were able to be disqualified — some users had devised a way to

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